


fruit baskets

by TheBookDinosaur



Series: andromeda tonks [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Community: HPFT, F/M, emotions expressed via fruit baskets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-09-01 05:07:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8609923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBookDinosaur/pseuds/TheBookDinosaur
Summary: Andromeda and Sirius Black are two black sheep, and black sheep need to stick together.





	

**Author's Note:**

> sooo apparently i have a lot of strong feelings about sirius and andromeda and cousinly love. oops

When his name is called for Sorting, he’s terrified. How could he not be? James from the train and his boat hadn’t been shy at all in saying that Slytherins were snakes, cunning and cowardly, and that Sirius didn’t seem like them at all. And of course Sirius was pleased about that, pleased to have another reason to set him apart from Bella and Cissy and Auntie Druella, who are all so frighteningly detached and logical and cold. But –

But.

He isn’t stupid, okay, he knows what it’ll mean for him if he’s Sorted into Gryffindor like James has been encouraging. If he was sorted into any house other than Slytherin, really, but especially Gryffindor. He can almost hear the words they’d whisper about him at family gatherings: _Blood traitor. How could he let his parents down like this? I always knew he was a bad seed._ The possibilities circle around and around in his head, dizzying him so much that he almost misses the stool to topple onto the floor. Did he want to put himself in Slytherin, though, did he want to be like them? No, he didn’t think so, he thought, but he doesn’t know what other house he might fit into. Gryffindor? Ravenclaw? He might be clever enough for Ravenclaw.

All he can hear is his own heartbeat thrumming in his ears as the Hat is lowered onto his head.

 _Well then_ , the Hat says into his mind. _We have another Black here. But not at all like his relatives, not at all..._ It trailed off and Sirius couldn't help thinking that it must enjoy stringing things out for the drama and suspense. The Hat chuckles. _Oh yes_ , it agrees, _eleven-year-olds can be so angsty. But you're a tough nut. I think you'll go well in GRYFFINDOR!_

The Hat is lifted off his head, and as Sirius turns to the Gryffindor table he has to look at the Slytherin table, just for a moment. They're all completely still; after a moment of surprise, the Gryffindor table has started to cheer, but the Slytherins are all watching him with disapproving eyes and straight faces, and whatever happiness Sirius felt drains out of him now in the face of the cold stares of the people who thought they were going to be his housemates.

There's a push on his back, and when he looks up the Professor who calls out the names is smiling at him and gesturing for him to walk to the Gryffindor table. He does so, trying desperately not to look at the green-and-silver table. When he sits down he risks a look across the Hall. Most of them have turned back to the Sorting, but he can see Andie still watching him – he smiles tentatively, and she winks and gives him a subtle thumbs-up.

He smiles properly back at her then, and turns to look more carefully at his new housemates. When ‘Potter, James’ is Sorted into Gryffindor as well, he is the one who cheers the loudest.

~*~

He's not really surprised when he gets a message the next day in the owl post from Andie's distinctly elegant snowy owl. The handwriting on it is neat:

_Do you want to meet up? Have you gotten your timetables yet?_

“Alweddy? Who's'at frum?” James asks from next to him, peering over his shoulder. Sirius gets out a quill and writes a reply on the back as he answers James.

“From my cousin,” he says, writing _we haven't got our timetables yet but I’ll skip first period 4 u_. He watches the owl fly back to Andie and snickers as her eyes widen and her shoulders shake with laughter. The owl comes back a few seconds later, looking distinctly fed up.

 _don't you dare_ , Andie's written, _first period's so obvious. skip second period and say you got lost. meet me outside your common room, but don't let the fat lady see you or she'll tell the teachers. and don’t actually get lost, that would be inconvenient._

Sirius actually does laugh at that, looks at Andie from across the Great Hall and gives her a thumbs-up before turning to James.

“Want to skip second period today?” he asks.

“Yeah!” James says, far too enthusiastically, and Sirius thinks that maybe he will like it here at Hogwarts after all.

~*~

“Siri,” Andie says as she envelops him in a hug and runs her fingers through his hair in that way she knows he finds comforting. She has a fruit basket in her hand, but doesn’t mention it, nodding instead at James. “Who's this?”

“James,” Sirius answers. “We're going to be best friends.” He can feel Andie hold back a laugh at this statement, and decides magnanimously to forgive her because she's his favourite cousin.

“Well, hi James,” Andi says, before pulling away from Sirius and directing her attention back at him. “Are you okay? Has anyone said anything to you?”

“No,” Sirius says, “we had first period with the Hufflepuffs. They're nice.”

“They are,” Andie agrees. After a pause and a slightly dubious glance at James, she says, “Well, you know what our family’s like, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Sirius says. He's already resigned himself to a couple of Howlers, and there’s a long letter from Mother that he hasn’t opened yet sitting on his bedside table. He doesn't realise that he's slumping until Andie's pushing his shoulders back and smacking his spine gently to get him to stand straight.

“Ignore what they say,” she tells him earnestly. “You're still a member of the family, and I'm sure they still love you.”

“Yeah,” Sirius says, sarcastically this time. Andie rolls her eyes and taps his ear.

“Don't get sarcastic with me,” she says. “Come to me if any of the other Slytherins are doing anything that makes you uncomfortable or you want to learn some hexes.”

“I'd like to learn hexes,” James says immediately, and Andie grins and taps his ear as well.

“No can do, sorry. You only get to learn hexes from me if you think you might need them.”

“Okay,” Sirius says.

“Congratulations,” Andie tells him, “on being Sorted into Gryffindor. Be proud of it.” Sirius can feel his spine straighten at that as she continues. “Bravery and courage are good traits to have.”

“Yeah,” Sirius says, because she's right.

“And here,” Andie says, handing him the fruit basket. “I was just thinking that I'd hate for my cousin not to have a fruit basket to welcome him.” She tips him a wink and walks away, her shoulders set like she could carry the world.

“Your cousin's _awesome_ ,” James says enthusiastically, pinching an apple and biting into it.

“Yeah,” Sirius says again. “She is.”

~*~

“Andie,” Sirius says, drawing out the word.

“Yes?”

“I’d like to learn hexes,” Sirius declares. “And so would James, and Remus, and Peter.”

“And who are Remus and Peter?” Andie asks him, turning around to poke him with a quill.

“My other best friends,” Sirius tells her. “I have three of them now.”

“Well,” Andie says. “I’m afraid I can’t justify just randomly teaching hexes to first-years without some sort of valid reason, you know.”

“I know,” Sirius says, trying to make his eyes as wide and earnest as possible, “but some of the Slytherins in my year have been saying really nasty things, and I’m afraid they might start to try and hex me.”

“Well, in _that_ case, of course I can teach you hexes,” Andie says, smiling. “Your eyes are very good, by the way.”

“Thanks,” Sirius says, pleased.

“So, anyway, the most important thing is the way you hold your wand,” Andie says, reaching out to adjust his grip. “Like that with your index finger pointing forward, that’s the most aggressive way to hold your wand, you see? And that’s why it works best with offensive spells…”

~*~

“Hey, Andie,” Sirius says, sidling up to her in the library. “Hey. Hey.”

“Hmm?” she asks, apparently startled out of some reverie. If he didn't know her better, Sirius would say that she was blushing. He squints at her suspiciously and then sidles even closer. “Hey.”

“Hey,” she replies. “You'll be wanting...?”

“So,” Sirius says twisting his hands together and not meeting her eyes. “If – ehm – someone wanted to, you know, hypothetically, perform some very advanced magic, you would be the right person to go to, right?” Andie takes a turn to squint at him suspiciously, and Sirius tries not to squirm under her accusing stare.

“Hypothetically, I'd say that you'd be right to come to me,” she says slowly.

“You are very clever,” Sirius says, and Andie wraps her pale fingers around his wrist.

“Don't bother flattering me, I'm a Black. What do you want?”

Sirius takes several deep breaths. “Animagus,” he says very quickly. “WhatifIwantedto –” he falters at the look on Andie's face. “Hypothetically, I mean.”

“Of course,” Andie agrees, still looking very suspicious. “Well, first off I'd ask why.” Sirius looks down, twists his hands together, and Andie finds herself tapping his hands and spine until he stands up straight the way she herself had been taught to stand.

“Um, well, can we keep that bit personal?” Sirius asks rather desperately.

“No,” Andie says, leaning back, “because it involves very dangerous magic and if you got caught you'd be in serious trouble, and if I got caught helping you I'd be in serious trouble. So who am I risking my reputation for?”

“Well, you know, your reputation could use a bit of tarnishing,” Sirius says. “It's so polished.” When he receives no response, he continues, shoulders slumping a little. “One of my dorm-mates has a problem,” he says carefully, “that means we can't be around him as humans, but if we can change into animals he won't attack – um, he'll leave us alone.”

Andie looks at him, and tries to put the pieces together. “I'm going to assume that your group of friends want to involve themselves as well?”

“Yes,” Sirius says.

“You're all foolish, and I hope you realise this could get you killed,” Andie says. Sirius nods, solemn. “Better wizards than you have tried and failed,” she says, trying to dissuade him.

“But those better wizards didn't have you helping them,” Sirius says, smiling winningly, and Andie laughs.

“Okay,” she says, “sure.” Sirius whoops and hugs her around the middle before running out of the library, presumably to tell his friends of his success.

~*~

“Why do you socialise with Sirius?” Cissa asks, frowning, toying with the diamond ring on her finger. It's small and classy, and Andie had congratulated herself for her restraint in not congratulating Lucius for his restraint. “You do realise that he's practically disowned?”

“He's still family,” Andie says to the ceiling.

“Still,” Cissa says meaningfully, and shudders. “I'd hate to be in his place. But there are worse companions than Potter, I suppose,” she murmurs approvingly.

~*~

“Hypothetically, how would you get rid of the taste of Mandrake leaves?”

“That’s disgusting, Siri. Try chocolate.”

 

“Hypothetically,” Sirius says, adjusting the strangely-perched beanie on his head, “how would one get rid of – um, dog ears. Or antlers. Or a tail. Any of those things. Hypothetically!”

“Stop saying _hypothetically_ , Siri, we both know what you’re doing.”

“You didn’t answer the question!”

“I’d have to brew you a Remotio Potion, which would take up a lot of my time and effort which should actually be going into my NEWT revision, Sirius Orion.”

“…Thank you?” Sirius says weakly, and Andromeda sighs and resigns herself to spending a couple of weeks down in Slughorn’s dungeons brewing ‘practice potions.’

~*~

Of course when Sirius tries to pull a prank on Remus – who had turned all the shower water into _apple juice_ last night, the devil – it went horribly wrong and caught some random seventh-year Hufflepuff, and of course the counter-curses that he and James had thought would work failed.

“What were you even doing at the Gryffindor table?” he asked the guy, who was looking down mournfully at the table.

“Your bacon is better,” he said. “I don’t suppose you could pass some up?”

Sirius passes the bacon up, tries the counter-curse again, and sighs. “I’ll get my cousin,” he says, and when the guy wrinkles his nose he practices Andie’s glare on him. “She’s Slytherin, but she’s nice.” He hops off the table before the guy can protest further, and brings a sleepy Andie back to the Great Hall where, thankfully, there aren’t that many people to witness his failed prank.

The guy hits his head on the table on the way down, despite Sirius’ best efforts at a Cushioning Charm, and Andie seems a lot more ruffled than she usually is about it, Sirius thinks as he trots next to her up to the Hospital Wing. She drags him in again the next day to make him apologise to the guy – Ted Tonks – and he can’t help but notice that Andie makes visiting him a regular thing.

“I’m not saying they’d be a great couple, except I’m definitely saying that they’d be a great couple,” he tells James, who nods understandingly. “But they’re not going to get together on their own.”

“They need our help,” James agrees, and in the next hour they come up with six well-developed ideas on how to throw the two of them together.

Andie loses her patience at the fourth plan, which had involved a broom cupboard, thanks to James’ enthusiastic lobbying for it. (“It’s a _classic_ Hogwarts method of getting together,” he’d said earnestly.)

“He’s a Mudblood,” she tells him. She sounds a little like she’s trying to convince herself against this. “Mother and Father are negotiating a marriage with Rabastan Lestrange.”

“All the more reason for you to elope. Also, my friends tell me not to use that word,” Sirius says defiantly. “It’s offensive.”

“What, Mudblood?” Andie asks, and in the next moment she looks so tired. “Look, you might enjoy being the black sheep of the family, but I won’t,” she snaps. Sirius pulls away, hurt because did she think he _chose_ this, his family or his personality, or his friends? “Don’t try this nonsense again.”

~*~

He and Andromeda make up within the week, because they’re both of them black sheep, and black sheep need to stick together. Also, she’d brought him a fruit basket, and the fruit she seemed to have a constant stock of was always amazing.

He doesn’t say anything more about her love life, but that’s only because she’s started to look a little happier, now, and when he was conducting some in-depth research on the layout of the library for the Map that he and the other boys are making he sees her laughing in the corner with someone who looked suspiciously like Ted Tonks.

~*~

“How, exactly, would someone make a cut in their spine that doesn’t damage their spinal cord, and then catch the blood?”

“That’s even worse than Mandrake leaves. No, idiot, don’t leave, I’ll do it. Come here.” 

 

“So, if I happened to need to cast a Patronus –”

“ _Why_. You’re in _second year_ , I don’t even think that’s _possible_.”

“To, um, solidify my animal form? That’s what the book said,” Sirius says defensively.

“Why did you have to do this,” Andromeda grumbles. “So, you have to think of something happy, your happiest memory…”

 

“Andie, help, what foods would a dog eat?” Sirius comes to ask her the day before her exams, undeterred by her fierce glare. “And how would I survive eating dog food for a _month_?”

“Just eat a lot of meat,” she advised, coming to terms with the fact that he’s not scared at all by her glaring. “Please don’t poison yourself with commercialised dog food.”

“What about deer?”

“Grass? Vegetables,” Andromeda decides. “Lots of vegetables. And rats are scavengers, rats can eat anything.”

“James is going to hate that,” Sirius says, sounding suspiciously gleeful.

~*~

Seventh- and fifth-years finish their exams the week before every other year, so Sirius is frowning over his Herbology notes when Andie comes to see him in the library, looking unusually serious even for her. His exam’s tomorrow and he's cramming and doesn't really want to be disturbed, so he pretends not to see her until she sits down at his table.

“Sirius,” she says, waiting for him to look up and meet her eyes before continuing. “I'm leaving,” she says, before maybe realising that this was possibly not the best way to start a conversation. “Leaving home, I mean.”

Sirius frowns, mandrakes and puffapods still circling around his head. “What?”

Andie sighs, with the air of bracing herself. “Ted Tonks,” she says. “I’m leaving school with him.”

Sirius sits up immediately at this, knocking a quill off the desk, all thoughts of cramming and exams forgotten. “What? Really?” he asks. “Aw _yiss_. You can’t ever dismiss my ideas again,” he tells her. “Because I’m always right, all the time.”

A ghost of a smile finds its way onto Andie's face. “Yeah, yeah,” she says.

“So _badass_ ,” Sirius says respectfully. “But what am I going to do without you at family dinners now?” She ignores this and gives him a not-so-gentle tap on the head.

“You're too young to be swearing,” Andie says, frowning at him.

“Can I meet him?” Sirius asks, and she rolls her eyes.

“I think you’d find a way to meet him even if I said no.”

“Probably,” Sirius says, and Andromeda rolls her eyes at him again because he has no shame.

~*~

That means that he’s present, at home, when everybody else is freaking out and fluttering their hands and writing furious letters for Andromeda to come home, come back, marry Rabastan Lestrange and they can put an end to this mess and spin the story favourably for her. Where is her sense of honour, they moan to each other, where is her sense of family?

Andie doesn’t come home. She doesn’t even return their letters, and Sirius feels absurdly proud, and also like a door has opened. (He could run away too, if he wanted; the possibility suddenly seems a million times more real now that somebody else has done it.)

James says they should send her a gift, because housewarming gifts are a thing and it’s good manners, so Sirius goes to the nearest Wizarding market and arranges for his owl to carry Andie a fruit basket.

~*~

 _Shockingly, just because I’m in third year doesn’t mean that I know more things,_ Sirius writes in his next letter to his favourite cousin. _Would you happen to know how to Transfigure me into an animal?_

Oh Merlin, no way, she writes back, and he will deny fervently that he grinned like a fool at her neat, somehow sarcastic writing for nearly five minutes. _Meet me at Hogsmeade through that secret passage you like to pretend I don’t know about and I’ll show you. Bring your friends._

 

_Is it even possible to live with animal senses for a month and also how do you do it._

_There’s a helpful book on the subject called ‘The Animal Kingdom and How It Pertains to Magic’ in the library. Don’t ask Madam Pince for it, since it’s pretty much a dead giveaway on what you’re doing. Duplicate it and take your own copy out of the library._

~*~

It takes until Sirius is in fourth year for Andie and Ted to get their game together and finally send him the letter he’s been expecting for ages.

_Andromeda Charis Black  
and  
Edward Bryson Tonks_

_Request the honour of your presence at their marriage._

“Finally!” James says when Sirius shows the letter to him, and Sirius nods enthusiastically.

“That was my reaction exactly.”

Sirius drags James and Remus and Peter along because he can, and when James makes a fuss about bringing a wedding gift Sirius rolls his eyes and buys another fruit basket.

“Oh, _honestly,_ ” James says, and writes to his parents to ask for a wedding gift for a friend. He gets a nice set of kitchenware back, with a letter attached which tells him sternly that there is no such thing as too much kitchenware.

“Well, that’s true enough,” a woman who’d introduced herself as Ted’s mother said when he relayed this message to her after he’d left the package on the table.

He knows that Andie would probably appreciate it if he put some effort into observing his surroundings and the decorations, which she’s no doubt arranged with the precise Black eye for detail, but all he can look at is the newly married couple, because he doesn’t think that he’s ever seen his cousin look so blissfully, beautifully happy.

“Congratulations,” he tells her, absurdly shy. She wraps an arm around him and blinks very fast.

“Thanks,” she says in a voice that’s mostly steady. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“So are James and Peter and Remus,” Sirius says once his voice is mostly under control. “But I think that’s mostly because of the food.”

~*~

 _That thing which we were hypothetically working on,_ Sirius sends to Andie, in the second week of his fifth year. _Hypothetically, we succeeded. Thank you._

 _Hypothetically,_ Andie sends back, and he doesn’t know how she makes her handwriting so sarcastic, he really doesn’t, but he’s jealous and wants the skill. _I’m relieved and very proud, and I demand pictures. Congratulations._

~*~

Next summer, Sirius is mostly thinking of Andie when he climbs out of a window in the rain, and trots away as a dog towards the Potter house.

He doesn’t know how she finds out, but she was a Slytherin, after all, and the next day her owl is waiting in her window, sitting on a fruit basket.

~*~


End file.
